How to politely ask for gift cards?

Just skip the registry. It’s not typical to receive physical gifts at a wedding anyway.

Unfortunately showers are traditionally for physical gifts. I would either live the physical gifts at your FH's house or say no gifts for the shower or decline a shower.

I don't think there's a nice way to say gift cards/cash :/

I live in CO and had my shower in SC. I did a Zola registry bc gifts are shipped to your home address. Only a few people bought anything from it, but it worked well. I was kind of irritated because my shower hostess requested gift cards on the invitation against my wishes, BUT people loved it and it turned out great. They were excited and said they preferred the convenience of just getting us a gift card so we could get what we wanted. And I used them to buy things that were on our registry anyway.

We had a shower in a different state and just shipped home what we couldn’t fit in our suitcases.

A friend of mine found a little poem online that she included in with her invitation that basically said "we know this is a little out of the ordinary, but we would appreciate cash". Look up wedding money poems.

Rachel & Xs favorite stores are Macy’s,Costco etc

Asking for cash, gifts cards, etc. (even with a "poem"...) is absolutely a "know your guests" issue. There are a good number of people who find this incredibly rude (and some would use the word tacky). (And, yes, those people tend to be older/more traditional guests, but at daughter's shower/wedding those were EXACTLY the people who were MOST generous in terms of the financial value of their gifts, so they may not be the best people to offend.) I'd be sure your registries have your delivery information, and if the hosts of the CA shower want to let people know that it might be more convenient to have bulkier gifts purchased from the registry shipped directly to your home, they can do that.

Especially if you don't know his CA family/guests particularly well, I'd tread cautiously about things that they might find rude/offensive.

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We had an engagement party we had to fly for and our host (my mother) did this - asked guests who would be gifting larger items to have them shipped to our address. She included this with our address as a separate slip of paper in the invitation.

That said, you don't open gifts at an engagement party while you traditionally do at a bridal shower, so you may want to go overboard on other activities if you won't have the gift-opening portion.

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This is what I was going to say!